ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the issues of rise, rule and decline of frontier empires in Central Asia from antiquity to the early modern era. Such empires have their origins in encounters between nomadic, tribal peoples and sedentary, civilised states. Latent frontier empires became emergent when some adversity—war, civil conflict, natural disasters—overtook their more civilised neighbours. Sometimes the frontier nomads exploited such an opportunity by invading from the outside, but often they took power from the inside after becoming an essential part of a state’s or empire’s military establishment. Imperialism and the creation of European colonial empires doomed the last descendants of Central Asian empire builders.
